Various business operations and services may be accomplished using computing platforms based on virtual machines. As a result, in the event of a virtual machine (“VM”) failure, a recovery of the virtual machine may be initiated. The recovery of a VM from a backup archive may be time consuming, especially if there is a large amount of data that needs to be transferred from the backup archive to the final destination (e.g. a production datastore). This means that the services provided by the VM being recovered may be unavailable while the recovery is running if conventional methods are used.
The availability of the VM or its underlying applications/data during the recovery may be a business-critical feature. Replicas of the virtual machine may be used during failure/recovery in order to make the underlying applications/data available, however this may be costly and require additional hardware or storage. Other options for maintaining virtual machine availability during failure/recovery may only be temporary solutions or may be subject to slow performance. As such, there may be a need for more reliable availability of virtual machines during failure/recovery.